This past week we got a master class in how to deploy opposition research in a presidential campaign. During the second debate, a question from CNN’s Anderson Cooper led Donald Trump to assert that he “did not kiss women without consent or grope women without consent.” At that point, the floodgates opened. The Scrapbook has lost precise count at this point, so let’s just say that multiple women in multiple publications came forward to say, no, to the contrary, he had done exactly that to them. Luke Thompson, who formerly worked at the National Republican Senatorial Committee and knows a thing or two about the political dark arts, described it this way:
Now we don’t necessarily attribute this degree of genius to the Clinton campaign. Trump is widely traveled, and the evidence that he is a handsy chauvinist or worse is ample and convincing. (It’s clear now why Hillary Clinton probably never lost much sleep, once Trump won the GOP nomination, over the prospect that she might have to account for her part in covering up the sexually predatory behavior of her own husband.)
But the timing of this flood of stories is maddening. There was precious little media effort to report such stories back when they might have prevented Trump from becoming the Republican nominee. It’s striking just how enthusiastically the media are now putting out stories that likely could have been reported earlier. But of course then they wouldn’t have done maximum damage to Republican electoral hopes.
This is all in marked contrast to 2012, when the big story was what the media didn’t report in October. Recall that the day after the deadly assault on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, President Obama gave an interview to 60 Minutes where he said it was “too early to tell” whether what had occurred was a terror attack or the result of spontaneous protests over a YouTube video. The remark was cut out of the interview when it aired. To promote the politically helpful fiction that it wasn’t a terror attack, Hillary Clinton told some families of those killed in Benghazi that the maker of the offending YouTube video would be arrested—and he was soon thereafter jailed (on grounds other than the political convenience of Hillary Clinton, as it happened, but it certainly looked like a political hit job).
A few weeks after the 60 Minutes interview, ascertaining when Obama admitted Benghazi was a terror attack became a flashpoint at the second presidential debate. Mitt Romney had faulted the president’s reluctance to admit the obvious. CNN moderator Candy Crowley famously interrupted Romney to erroneously “correct” his version of events. CBS News and 60 Minutes could have cleared this up by releasing the full interview with Obama, and zeroing in on his “too early to tell” line. But this would have redounded to Romney’s credit and not been very helpful to the Obama campaign, so they didn’t report it. Just days before the election, CBS quietly released the transcript of the Obama interview to provide a fig leaf of an argument that they hadn’t hidden it from voters. By that time, the controversy had largely petered out.
Did we mention the president of CBS News, David Rhodes, is the brother of White House national security adviser Ben Rhodes? The same Obama functionary who later bragged to the New York Times about creating a media “echo chamber” to help the Obama White House sell a misleading “narrative” about the Iran nuclear deal? The Scrapbook tries not to lapse into a conspiratorial mindset about the media, as most of the time they’re merely incompetent. But every October before a presidential election, paranoia seems oddly justified.
